GDC 2007: Fury Hands-On

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Hate people? This game's all PvP.

By Charles Onyett

Tossing away player versus environment combat entirely, Auran's MMO entitled Fury narrows the focus strictly to player versus player (PvP) affairs. There aren't any races or classes in this game either. Your avatar will always be human, and you'll only have one avatar per account. Despite those limitations, the game seems to offer quite a bit in the way of character customization. Players can choose between four "schools" of magic, and rank up each skill according to how much it's used. Your character gains ranks as well, earned separately from skill gains, by performing PvP quests handed out by NPCs standing in the game's player populated safe zones, called sanctuaries.

To try and intensify rivalry, the game's PvP matches, whose types include something similar to capture the flag, team deathmatch, and free for all, the game throws servers into direct competition. If you join up with Lizardface server (that's a fake name), then you'll always be fighting alongside your fellow Lizarfaces against other servers when hopping from sanctuaries to instanced PvP arenas. A matchmaking service is being implemented for Fury, ensuring you get opponents and teammates of similar rank.

Before entering combat you can accept "trial" quests from NPCs who give you instructions to use specific types of skills frequently. Once the usage quota is fulfilled, your character bumps up a rank, to a maximum of 10. Instead of giving you better stats or skills, you're rewarded with equip points which you can spend on assigning more of your skill repertoire to active slots. Each rank also opens up new skills for use, and it's your call whether to switch to the new ones or stick to the ones you've already spent time ranking up.

We played the Bloodbath game type, a free-for-all deathmatch, and found the game to be extremely fast paced. Characters, controlled from a third person perspective like in many other MMOs, bolt around at a quick clip. Spells and other abilities have an extremely short cooldown time, meaning even some of the more powerful attacks we were using could be unleashed in rapid succession. The limiting factor is charge. Generally, it seemed weaker attacks build up charge, while more powerful attacks consume charge. We were using a magic nuking type of character, and had to spam fireballs to build enough charge for a larger fireball and fire nova. Apparently the schools of magic also have charge stealing and transfer abilities, which could lead to some interesting team dynamics during group matches. To help survive during online matches, health pickups and various status augmentation items can be picked up during play.

It'd be a giant pain to have to reconfigure all 411 of the game's abilities every time you wanted to alter your character's role, but Auran sidestepped the problem by allowing players to save up to 211 presets. That number seems a little like overkill, but still, being able to quickly save and load abilities that allow you to swap between healer, tank, and nuker roles is certainly appreciated. Swapping ability presets is limited to sanctuary areas, though, so you need to be sure of your role before hopping into the arena.

During battle players will earn money and, if they're lucky, items by killing others, which are added to a coffer. At the end of a battle, the coffer opens and you can pick three items to take back to the sanctuary. If you're in a team game, you'll have the choice to roll on three of the items and take a fraction of the accumulated money. You'll also earn essence, a non-tradable currency which you can use in two ways. First, it can be spent to gain faction with certain NPCs and unlock access to special items. Second, it can be donated to obelisks on your server. The server with higher proportions of essence donated to essence earned will receive substantial buffs when entering an arena. Servers will need to continually donate, though, as they can lose the buff if the population gets greedy and the proportion drops too low.

Auran is still finalizing the distribution model, but as of right now it seems like players would have to shell out cash for a box copy and be able to play online for free. There'd be an optional subscription fee for the ability to sell items on an auction system, access special items that switch up your character's appearance, as well as get into the game's crafting aspect, a piece of the game we were informed won't be ready until a few months past launch. Non-paying users would still have the ability to browse the auction and access all the game's other content. Fury is currently in closed alpha, might move into closed beta / stress test mode in May, and ship in the fourth quarter of 2007.

While discussing the game's pricing structure, we breathed a sigh of relief when Auran told us the special items available for real dollar purchase wouldn't bestow any kind of benefit on the player aside from aesthetic attractiveness. Such systems that swing gameplay advantages to only paying customers are bad news for a gaming public already emptying their wallets for the latest hardware, yet unfortunately a rather popular pricing method for online games in Asian territories.

Overall we had fun with Fury, though we couldn't ignore a few camera problems where our perspective would mysteriously snap to an odd angle, blocking our view of the onscreen action. Given how this game's release is still so far off, this will hopefully get smoothed out.